The “Advance Without Authority”[1]:
Post-modernism, Libertarian Socialism, and Intellectuals

Chamsy Ojeili

Abstract:
The eclipse of socialist statism and the advent of post-modernism have
generated important questions about the role and future of Left intellectuals,
political organisation, and theory. Socialist statism’s vanguardism, elitism,
scientism, and substitutionism have been thoroughly discredited. The advent of
post-modernism is one signal of this. The post-modern rejection of universalism,
its critique of representation, and its emphasis on situatedness provide a
challenge to emancipatory thought. However, post-modernism’s suspension of
judgement, relativism, and – most importantly – rejection of universalism is not
a coherent emancipatory alternative. A more fruitful way of answering questions
about intellectuals and political organisation is to examine the broad
libertarian socialist tradition. At various times, thinkers within this
political field have managed to steer a path between vanguardism and
revolutionary waiting, between scientism and theoretical randomisation,
advancing without authority to organise and theorise towards a radically
democratic social order beyond state and capital.

Introduction

The current period is a time of profound
uncertainty for Left intellectuals. As Anderson has noted, the entire ground
upon which the New Left was built has been eroded, and rampant neo-liberalism
stands as “the most successful ideology in world history”.[2]
Further, elements of the post-modern imagination appear to stand as an
unsurpassable cultural and political horizon for progressive thinkers, and this
post-modernism seems, at times, non-socialist, even anti-socialist, in
orientation. For many on the broad Left, this climate has encouraged attention
to the role of, and scope of tasks for, the intellectual today, in creating “a
new hegemonic socialist paradigm”.

For a number of thinkers, the present time
is one of pessimism and withdrawal to the socialist watchtower. Anderson, for
instance, calls for an “uncompromising realism” before the enormous tasks at
hand. In a similarly pessimistic vein, Russell Jacoby has lamented the retreat
of progressive intellectuals from utopian concerns to the struggle to publish[3]:
“[the New Left became] professors who neither looked backwards nor sideways;
they kept their eyes on professional journals, monographs and conferences”.[4]

For others, the ground clearing effected
by the advent of post-modernism and the “crisis of socialism” makes ours a time
of possibilities. Post-modern philosopher and red-diaper baby Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country,[5]
for instance, is a plea to a now spectatorial, retrospective, overly culturalist,
and pessimistic Left to once again become the “party of hope”, able to inspire
(America) with stories of nationhood and progress. More radically, critical
theorist Douglas Kellner has spoken of the new possibilities before Left
intellectuals that the advent and dissemination of new technologies brings.[6]
These new technologies potentially form a new public sphere within which the
critical-oppositional intellectual, a re-working of Sartre’s vision of
intellectual life, can educate and organise towards a socialist society.

One noteworthy recent contribution to the
debate about the role and future of the Left intellectual is Suman Gupta’s Marxism, History, and Intellectuals: Towards a Reconceptualised Transformative
Socialism.[7]
Gupta provides a rigorous examination of the place of the intellectual within
the Marxist tradition, an attempt to resolve or move beyond the blockages within
this tradition, and ―
more grandly still ―
an attempt to reconstruct an equalitarian socialist programme. According to
Gupta, since Marx’s wrestling match with Hegel, the socialist intellectual has
been rendered invisible. With the discovery of History, class struggle, and the
proletariat, there is no legitimate place anymore for the thinker who must
become proletariat in a mysterious transfiguration, or who, as practical
revolutionary, is the intellectual’s other. Against Marxian coyness or
self-deception, Gupta forwards the case for a full autonomy for socialist
intellectuals as the primary agents of a reconstructed socialism.

Gupta’s work is impressive in its exegetical
detail and dense in its argumentation. However, Gupta’s proposals could also be
understood as too close to the elitism, scientism, and substitutionism of now
virtually eclipsed socialist statism (social democracy and Leninism). It is
important to show that emancipatory discourse is not exhausted by such socialist
orthodoxy. This task has been, I think, one of the features of the debate around
the project of inclusive democracy. With respect to the questions of intellectuals and organisation,
for instance, participants in this debate have called for a new type of
political organisation that mirrors the desired structure of the social order to
be established.[8]
This organisation would, therefore, have quite a different shape to the party
form of social democracy and Leninism. However, the inclusive democracy project
rejects both the lifestyle strategy of social change and post-modern
fragmentation, insisting on the need to mount a hegemonic challenge to the
domination of state and capital. The most important role for such an
organisation and for intellectuals would be as catalysts to the
establishment of new institutions and the development of an alternative
consciousness, since, for the inclusive democracy project, the establishment of
a new society must be, first and foremost, the self-reflective, collective
choice of autonomy.

In the following essay, I aim to examine
questions of social transformation, intellectual life, and political
organisation. I want to examine these questions in relation to post-modernism,
socialist orthodoxy, and the libertarian socialist tradition. In this essay, the
libertarian socialist tradition is defined broadly to encompass socialist and
anarchist sub-traditions such as western Marxism (Korsch, Gramsci, Marcuse),
council communism (Pannekoek, Pankhurst, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Debord),
Bordigism (Camatte, Barrot), anarcho-communism (Kropotkin, Berkman, Goldman,
Bookchin), anarcho-syndicalism (Chomsky, Rocker), and impossibilism (William
Morris, Daniel De Leon, the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), the Socialist Party of
Great Britain (SPGB)). In this sense, the libertarian socialist tradition runs
wide and is internally divided. However, despite its internal divergences,
libertarian socialism holds together, both through its implacable opposition to
socialist orthodoxy’s state capitalism and vanguardism, and through its
commitment to popular sovereignty. This emancipatory discourse moves
uncertainly, through tensions between working class self-emancipation and the
desire for independent socialist organisation, between science/theory and
movement, between anti-intellectual withdrawal and theoretical and political
engagement. At libertarian socialism’s best moments, these tensions have, I will
contend, resulted in an “advance without authority”, which nonetheless avoids
the localism, individualism, anti-intellectualism, and romanticism sometimes
found in post-modern considerations of intellectual life. At best, libertarian
socialists have avoided the anti-politics of both revolutionary waiting and
Jacobinism, promising an ironic but engaged and confident politics of the
present.

From Marx to Post-modernism

Marx, as Lovell[9]
notes, was never clear about the relationship between his project and the
working class movement, about the link between leaders, intellectuals, parties,
and the masses. At a certain moment, communist intellectuals, their theory, and
the party are lent no autonomy whatsoever. Marx insists that revolutions cannot
be made and communism is not an ideal.[10]
Socialism is a “real movement” to be achieved by the working class made
conscious as a result of “the premises now in existence”, of history itself.
Therefore, communism was not a function of the educative investments of
intellectuals, the revolutionary exertions of a clique of activists, or the
result of a “good theory”.

At the next moment, however, Marx elevates
philosophy to the head of a coming emancipation. Theory - rather than always
arriving too late, rather than being historical and partisan - might have a
leading role, a leading role attributable to its scientificity above and
beyond its historical coordinates or attachments to progressive social
movements. Here, the moralistic and messianic motif is replaced by a scientific
emphasis on the primacy of material forces and the laws of capitalist
development.[11]
This second tendency posits Marxism as a hard science in line with the natural
sciences ―
complete, objective, and able to unproblematically guarantee the truth of its
theoretical propositions. This science is developed and expounded by the
communists, “the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties
of every country”. And, because these communists “have raised themselves to the
level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole”,
because “they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of
clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate
general results of the proletarian movement”,[12]
they appear to have an independent authority over the working class.

Post-modernism is the most radical
contemporary expression of the difficulties encountered by these socialist
formulations on intellectuals, political organisation, and theory. Most
crucially, the post-modernist challenge to socialist theory and practice is
contained in its sharp critique of representation. In its philosophical form,
this challenge is an attack on the metaphor of the mind as a mirror of nature,
on the confident separation of science from ideology, and on the aspiration for
totalising theories of social order and history.[13]
Today, no one believes that theory can escape ideology and that we might someday
achieve closure and scientific certainty on social matters. Postmodernism has
instead turned to accent partiality, play, and theoretical openness. The
critique of representation also entails a rejection of any sort of vanguardism.[14]
Here, post-modernity as a whole entails a declining faith in party political
organisation and a rather modest conception of the role of the contemporary
intellectual. There can, it is argued, be no unproblematic identity between the
people and the party/intellectual.

Thus it was that Michel Foucault spoke of
the closing of the period in which “To be an intellectual meant something like
being the consciousness/conscience of us all.”[15]
The “universal intellectual”, “proclaiming the rights of humanity, unveiling
deceit and hypocrisy, attacking despotism and false hierarchies, combating
injustices and inequalities”, had given way, argued Foucault, to the “specific
intellectual”.[16]
Against the image of the intellectual as “somewhat ahead and to the side”,
Foucault’s specific intellectual would work “within specific sectors, at the
precise points where their own conditions of life or work situate them.”[17]

Vital in the post-modern emphasis on
specificity is the opposition to universalist claims. Illustrative of the
post-modern position, here, is Bernard-Henry Levy’s imaginary year 2000
dictionary entry for intellectuals: “noun, masculine gender, a social and
cultural category born in Paris at the moment of the Deyfus Affair, dead in
Paris at the end of the twentieth century, apparently was not able to survive
the decline of belief in universals”.[18]
There is, argues Lyotard, no “universal subject-victim”, and there can therefore
be no more intellectuals – at least in the Sartrean sense.[19]
Neither can there be the sort of intellectual “detached concern” for humanity
that Lewis Coser[20]
speaks of.

Foucault’s comments on the specific
intellectual resonate with an apparent truth regarding the post-modern age,
hyper-sensitised to “the indignity” ―
not to mention the dangers ―
“of speaking for others”.[21]
The notion that a philosopher or a political organisation could effectively
represent any social whole, the pretensions of intellectuals to knowledge of
people’s real interests, and the assumption of universal values pointing
towards some future harmonious order are all anathema to the post-modern
thinker. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman[22]
has argued that the model of the intellectual as ethical and cultural legislator
is now gone. With the consumer choices, privatisation, identity fragmentation,
and – most importantly – the decline of “great utopias … projects of global
engineering” that post-modernism encompasses, we witness a change in the role of
the intellectual. Having lost their function as cultural legislators,
intellectuals, in Bauman’s opinion, have a new, apparently more modest function
as cultural interpreters: “translators in the ongoing exchange between
autonomous, diverse but equivalent styles.” This interpreter-intellectual is
forced to “advance without authority”, though he or she is still endowed with
the duty of making unheard voices audible and still burdened by the
courage and sacrifice such a duty requires.[23]
This may certainly not appear ideal, but in the post-legitimation era it is “the
only feasible, sensible and, indeed … realistic programme that the intellectuals
… have and are likely to have for some time to come.”

For the contemporary socialist with Marx
still on his or her mind, the post-modern choices look equally unsatisfactory.
The intellectual in Foucault and Bauman looks too little involved in the
questions of universal significance that socialism is vitally concerned with. A
second option – ludic Baudrillardian culturalist escapism – looks even worse.
Finally, the muscular reassertion of the heritage and true role of the modern
progressive intellectual by thinkers such as Christopher Norris and Edward Said
appears far too individualist and romantic,[24]
despite its and its proponents’ obvious appeal.

On the one hand, post-modernism’s liberal
modesty regarding the tasks of intellectuals, and the authority of parties and
theory is very attractive when placed beside those political axioms of socialist
orthodoxy: the intellectual or party as ruler-legislator, as privileged
interpreter of the direction of history and the real needs of the masses, and as
bearer of a theory or utopian vision that guides and guarantees the movement’s
success. In this vein, those post-modern elements prefigured by Castoriadis are
vital: the jettisoning of the notion of history as progress, the rejection of
the idea of a single and universal reason, and the emphasis on the instituted,
historical specificity, and the priority of the political.[25]
On the other hand, as noted, post-modernism falls short, in a number of ways, of
the necessary tasks ahead for the socialist thinker. That is, post-modern
thinkers have uncritically rejected universalism and overvalued contingency and
difference, under-theorised the still central place of state and capital, and
foreclosed on the possibility of a collective project oriented towards
alteration of those “structures of unfreedom”.[26]
It is my contention that from within the libertarian emancipatory tradition
there are resources that go beyond both post-modernism and socialist orthodoxy
(considered below).

From the Second International to Bolshevism

The pages in the
Communist Manifesto
that fall under the heading “Proletarians and Communists” begin with a series of
propositions on the relations between communists and the proletariat and end
with a number of proposals of a state capitalist character. The deep structure
of passages such as these, commentators have claimed, clearly indicates a bid
for power by the intellectuals. For instance, for Gouldner: “At the deepest
reaches of Marxism, what we unearth is the ancient commitment to govern
rationally - the commitment to the ‘philosopher king’.”[27]
According to Gouldner, Marxism is founded on a paradox - a paradox that will
later be resolved by Lenin’s vanguard party. “The Marxist scenario of class
struggle was never able to account for itself, for those who produced the
scenario, for Marx and Engels themselves. Where did the theorists of this
class struggle fit into the supposed cleavage between proletariat and capitalist
class?”.[28]
Gouldner concludes that this lacuna is important in understanding Marxism as the
expression of the aspirations of the “New Class”, those intellectuals and
intelligentsia seeking to counter their own blocked ascendance to power.[29]
Here, those measures suggested at the end of the second section of the Manifesto serve to propel this New Class to ruling class by eliminating the
rule of money capital in favour of cultural capital. A consideration of
socialist statism, I argue, supports Gouldner’s equation of socialism with rule
by the intellectual or party. It is this conception of socialist political and
intellectual life that must be superseded, without making the mistakes of strong
post-modernism.

In the period from the 1890s until the
First World War, with the crises of ministerialism in France and revisionism in
Germany, and with the increasingly syndicalist mood among militants, the problem
of the relationship of theorists, political leaders, and workers became ever
more vexed.[30]
The response by thinkers like Engels and Lafargue to such conflicts was a common
and paradoxical anti-intellectualism, which relegated intellectuals to a mere
function of economic development.[31]
However, within the Second International, the intellectual had a decisive place:
“Even before political socialism appeared on the scene, the labour lawyer who
defended the workers’ rights was often an important figure. Socialist parties
offered an even more fruitful field of work to progressive-minded intellectuals.
As parliamentary experts they drafted the bills which the socialist deputies
proposed; as editors they wrote articles in the socialist press; as authors they
popularised socialist ideas or developed and defended them in discussions with
their opponents; as instructors they gave intellectual training to leaders and
subleaders of proletarian origin; as lawyers they advised the party officers how
to avoid legal traps or defended them in political trials. Through the mere fact
of their participation, the intellectual demonstrated that the socialist appeal
was not merely based on the economic interest of the individual, but also on the
significance which were the concern of all mankind”.[32]

The “pope of Marxist orthodoxy”, Karl
Kautsky, understood the party as representative of and legislator for the
working class. For Kautsky, it was the party that would take power after
the revolution, as a class, though it might rule, could not directly govern.[33]
In Kautsky’s opinion, it was the very character of those in the party, as
professional and skilled politicians and as technically-trained intelligentsia,
that allowed for, or, more strongly, necessitated this role for the
intellectual and the party.

Capable of freeing themselves from the
determinants of their backgrounds, intellectuals could, Kautsky argued, lend to
workers a “clear conception of their historical function” and “clarity and
consciousness of goals”.[34]
In fact, Kautsky famously asserted that “Modern socialist consciousness can
arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge … The vehicle of
science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia.” Therefore,
“socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class
struggle from without” and is “not something that grew naturally from within
it”.[35]
It is, though, important to clarify Kautsky’s point ―
and so differentiate his position from Lenin’s. What was introduced from
without, for the fatalistic and optimistic Kautsky, was “modern socialism,” that
is, Marxism.[36]
It was, in Kautsky’s reckoning, the intellectual’s function to provide
“knowledge of the goal” and a scientific basis for workers’ ideals and
instincts, but revolutions could not be made.[37]

The precise content and function of this
“modern socialism” expounded by Second International orthodoxy developed from
Engels’ extrapolations of Marx’s work in contributions such as Anti-Duhring,[38]Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, and the
posthumously published Dialectics of Nature. The growing popularity of
Marx’s work demanded a clearer formulation, and Engels proved an excellent
populariser and simplifier,[39]
in the process attaching Marx’s work to natural science, diminishing the
idealistic, ethical, and historicist accents in Marx’s work, and systematising
Marx’s oeuvre into “historical materialism”. Within the rising social
democratic movement, developing beneath the “long shadow” cast by Darwin[40]
and the achievements of science, Marxism became an important myth for adherents,
a set of simple and wide-ranging axioms that could be wielded against opponents.[41]

Lenin’s voluntarism and the context in
which Bolshevism developed produced important differences between Leninism and
classical social democracy; yet, in essentials, the consonance is obvious.
Signalling the context of feudal absolutism and illegality, Lenin’s infamous
treatise of 1902, What is to be Done?, champions the organisational
principles of secrecy, the closely-monitored selection of professional
revolutionaries, centralism, and the disciplinary subordination of members to
the party’s central command.[42]
Given the division and degradation of the working class, and the age and weight
of bourgeois ideology, socialist consciousness must be introduced to the
proletariat from without. The party must thus train and enlighten the masses,
express their interests and direct all their activities along the path of
conscious class politics[43]:
“only the political party of the working class, i.e., the Communist Party, is
capable of uniting, training and organising a vanguard of the proletariat and of
the whole mass of the working people … and of guiding all the united activities
of the whole of the proletariat, i.e., of leading it politically, and through
it, the whole mass of the working people. Without this the dictatorship of the
proletariat is impossible”.[44]Thus, for Lenin, to
weaken the party was to weaken the working class.[45]

Bolshevism’s accentuation of the party and the
intellectual was closely tied to their presumed capacity for developing a
correct and guiding theory. Revolutionary theory was vital, and the content of
such theory followed from Engels’ simplifications and confidence: “The Marxist
doctrine is omnipotent because it is true”. And despite Lenin’s war-time
Hegelian rethinking, it was Lenin’s earlier, raw theoretical conceptions,
developed in Materialism and Empiriocriticism and Three Sources of
Marxism, that furnished the “Diamat” of Soviet Marxism, as official state
ideology.

Libertarian
Socialists on Parties and Intellectuals

The above notions of intellectual life,
political organisation, and theory have dominated the socialist movement. They
have also been the focus for a post-modernism desperate to differentiate its
politics and theory from the authoritarian consequences of socialist statism. I
shall now examine the contribution of a broad socialist tradition that has
opposed this orthodoxy and that offers a vision of intellectual life beyond
party functionary, theory beyond dogma, and politics beyond substitutionism and
elitism.

The libertarian socialist advance beyond
substitutionism and elitism has not been achieved all at once or in a
straightforward and linear manner. Much libertarian socialism was faced with,
and marked by, a troubled social-historical context. Periodically, until the
time of revolutionary insurgency from 1917, libertarian socialists had fought
the de-radicalisation and bureaucratisation of European social democracy.
Against the elitism and quietism of the social democrats, libertarian socialists
emphasised proletarian self-organisation. Conversely, the failures of the
spontaneous movements of proletarian unrest in the 1917-1923 period led some
thinkers back to the problems of politics and culture. The collapse of the
immense hopes raised by the struggles around the First World War was, in a
sense, the failure both of the unrealistic hopes for parties and of those
for the proletariat. The SPD showed itself a bureaucratic and nationalist force
that rejected social revolution. The Bolsheviks seized power on their own behalf
and worked to undermine the organs of workers’ power. On the other hand, the
proletariat in Europe refused to grasp power when it seemed there for the
taking, settling instead for the meagre gains of republican democracy or, worse,
supinely allowing all working class organisations to be crushed by the reaction.
It was amidst such failures and the dilemmas of isolation versus compromise and
sectarianism versus incorporation[46]
that the possibility emerged of a properly political and engaged but non-vanguardist
conception of socialist struggle. Insisting that the predominant force of
societal transformation was the organisation of the mass of people by the mass
of people, even the extreme spontaneist conclusions of libertarian socialists
like Luxemburg and Paul Mattick did not mean a cessation of intellectual and
political work. Here, intellectuals intervene with the aim of generalising
socialist consciousness because they must, even while insisting that “revolution
is not a party affair”. These libertarian socialists have diminished the
authority of intellectuals, while continuing, as intellectuals, to enter the
battle over the social question. A certain tension here is inescapable, and it
has meant that libertarian socialists frequently oscillated between the
anti-politics of pure proletarian spontaneity and a substitutionist position
that is hard to distinguish from orthodoxy. Nonetheless, at certain moments,
libertarian socialists have managed to combine a strong political attachment and strong democratic commitments, intervention
and modesty.

Anarchism

Anarchism posed an early challenge to the
vanguardism and statism it detected in the Marxian conception of communism. The
consequences of the growth of parliamentary action, ministerialism, and party
life, charged the anarchists, would be de-radicalism and embourgeoisiement.
Further, state politics would subvert both true individuality and true
community. In response, many anarchists refused Marxist-type organisation,
seeking to dissolve or undermine power and hierarchy by way of loose
political-cultural groupings, or by championing organisation by a single,
similtaneously economic and political administrative unit (Ruhle, Syndicalism).
The power of the intellectual and of science were also rejected by many
anarchists: “In conquering the state, in exalting the role of parties, they
[intellectuals] reinforce the hierarchical principle embodied in political and
administrative institutions”.[47]
Revolutions could only come through force of circumstances and/or the inherently
rebellious instincts of the masses (the “instinct for freedom” (Bakunin,
Chomsky)). Thus, in Bakunin’s words: “All that individuals can do is to clarify,
propagate, and work out ideas corresponding to the popular instinct”.
[48]

Yet, even the apparently hyper-spontaneist
anarchists showed themselves unable to comply with the logical consequences of
privileging the masses and rejecting leadership. For example, with his notion of
a “collective, invisible dictatorship,” and because of his penchant for secret
societies and ill-conceived plots,[49]
Bakunin has been viewed by a number of thinkers as the hitherto unacknowledged
father of Lenin’s authoritarian vanguard party. Similarly, while syndicalism
held to the notion of the moral superiority of the heroic, self-sacrificing
working class ―“le
travail est grand et noble, c’est la source de toute richesse et de toute
moralite”[50]―
many syndicalists similtaneously expounded the idea of a “minorite conscient”
that would activate the indifferent or idiotic (“zeros humains”) masses.[51]

The anarchists also challenged Marxian
conceptions of the place and content of socialist theory. As Flacks has pointed
out: “To make social theory is frequently to attempt to make history … Social
theories are levers intellectuals use to influence power structures, to
facilitate political outcomes, to enable groups interested in exercising control
to improve their practice, to justify their ascendency, to achieve their goals,
or to advance their interests.”[52]
Socialist orthodoxy denied this political dimension, presenting theory as no
more than scientific investigation that relays what lies before us, thereby
secretly privileging theory and theorist, and devaluing popular self-activity.[53]
Further, socialist orthodoxy has avoided properly addressing the crucial
questions: “what … of the relationship of the intellectual to those whose
interests are represented? What of the cultural power and authority of
intellectuals themselves?”.[54]
The anarchists showed themselves to be concerned with these questions.

Many anarchists have placed tremendous
faith in human rationality, and have viewed the human being as profoundly the
effect of circumstances and thus of the opportunities for enlightenment that he
or she encounters.[55]
While many anarchists have followed Bakunin and Kropotkin in seeing revolution
as given by force of circumstances, many have rejected the Marxian
super-determination (the “inevitable fatalism of rigid natural laws”[56])
that reduces the proletariat to an object and emphasises only economic
conditions. Instead, they have maintained that people can be swayed by the moral
and rational arguments a libertarian education would provide.[57]
Thus for numerous anarchists – Reclus, Berkman, Goldman, Bookchin - the task
ahead, in Pelloutier’s words, is “instruire pour revolter”.[58]

The anarchists have been suspicious of
theory and theorists, emphasising movement over theory,[59]
and rejecting theoretical closure: “We do not boast that we possess absolute
truth; on the contrary, we believe that social truth is not a fixed
quality, good for all times, universally applicable, or determinable in advance
… Thus our solutions always leave the door open to different and, one hopes,
better solutions”.[60]
At times, such distrust of the “representatives of science”[61]
lapses into irrationalism, as in Sorel’s accent on will, struggle, and myth or
in Landauer’s Nietszchean conception of history as flux, poetry, and love.[62]

For all their suspicion of final answers and
the claims of science, though, most anarchists have not rejected the aspirations
of classical social theory. A rational, even scientific, social theory has
therefore remained an important goal for numerous anarchists. Chomsky and
Kropotkin, for example, both display an immense faith in rational thought,
Enlightenment values, and science

Marxism

If the anarchists made a rather early and
clear break from the notion of liberation as the rule of intellectuals and
parties, such a turn was slower emerging within the Marxian tradition. One does
find early expressions of such perspectives in Morris and the Socialist Party of
Great Britain (the SPGB), then again around the events of 1905, with the growing
concern at the bureaucratisation and de-radicalisation of international
socialism. However, the most important ruptures are to be traced to the
insurgency during and after the First World War. Disillusioned with the
capitulation of the social democrats, excited by the emergence of workers’
councils, and slowly distanced from Leninism, many communists came to reject the
claims of socialist parties and to put their faith instead in the masses. For
these socialists, “The intuition of the masses in action can have more genius in
it than the work of the greatest individual genius”.[63]

Luxemburg’s workerism and spontaneism are
exemplary of positions later taken up by the far-left of the period – Pannekoek,
Roland Holst, and Gorter in Holland, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, Gramsci in
Italy, Lukacs in Hungary. In these formulations, the dictatorship of the
proletariat was to be the dictatorship of a class, “not of a party or of a
clique”. Moreover, such social change could not be “artificially devised”,[64]
but could only emerge through History and its struggles; that is, action rather
than education was the midwife to socialism: “To educate the proletarian masses
socialistically [in the past] meant to deliver lectures to them, to circulate
leaflets and pamphlets among them. No, the socialist proletariat doesn’t need
all this. The workers will learn in the school of action”.[65]

In practice, however, things were not so
simple. For instance, as Gombin has argued, Luxemburg’s whole career was
concerned with an attempt to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable: an
autonomous proletarian movement with the need for a vanguard.[66]
Sometimes this vanguard is but the “speaking part” to the active chorus that is
the masses; sometimes the party is to forge ahead and to accelerate the
revolutionary process; sometimes the party itself is to take power.[67]
Luxemburg was reluctant to stray from the old social democratic vision of the
party.[68]
When she did, however, she lapsed into Jacobin fantasies, imagining that the
Spartacus Union - hardly a mass organisation - might take power. In general,
libertarian socialists have been reluctant to give up the idea that there is
still a vital role for communist thinkers and communist organisation in the
achievement of socialism. The tension between anti-vanguardism and vanguardism
has frequently resolved itself in two diametrically opposed ways: the first
involved a drift towards the party; the second saw a move towards the idea of
complete proletarian spontaneity.

The first course is exemplified most
clearly in Gramsci and Lukacs. Radicalised by the prevailing syndicalist mood
and by the appearance of councils in Italy, Hungary, and elsewhere, Gramsci and
Lukacs initially emphasised the proletariat over the party: “Nothing but the
unity and will of the proletariat can destroy the old society and build the
new”.[69]
With the defeat of the post-war proletarian unrest, both thinkers came to
elevate the party over the proletariat. For Lukacs,[70]
“the working class without an independent political party is a rump without a
head”, and it became the party that was prefigurative of socialism,
embodying all that was potentially admirable in the proletariat as a class for
itself.[71]

The second course is illustrated in the
tendency, developing from the Dutch and German far-lefts, which inclined towards
the complete eradication of the party form. For instance, Pannekoek soon came to
the conclusion that there was an internal contradiction to the phrase
“revolutionary party”.[72]
In fact, Pannekoek went so far as to suggest that: “The belief in parties is the
main reason for the impotence of the working class.”[73]
In 1927, when the Dutch councilist group, KAPN (Communist Workers’ Party of
Netherlands), asked him to clarify whether he was or was not a member, Pannekoek
replied: “I consider the party-system and the conception of party membership to
be in large part a remnant of the earlier socialist era of the workers’
movement, which, however inevitable it may be in certain respects, is in general
harmful. For this reason, I remain outside it”.[74]
However, by 1936, the party form returns disguised as a “work group” for the
“transitional period … of education and enlightenment”,[75]
in Pannekoek’s attempt to theorise away his own continued participation in
“separate” political organisations and to erase the ever-present problem of the
role of intellectual in the projected revolution. In a similar vein, in later
years Pannekoek also prescribed a role (also promoted, at certain points, by
Pankhurst, Bordiga, and Barrot) to groupings of intellectuals in periods “of
decline, of confusion, of deceit”. At such times, intellectuals could preserve
“the principles of class struggle” for a future revival.[76]

Such covert educationisme was dispensed
with by some of Pannekoek’s political descendents. A faction within Socialisme ou Barbarie (SoB) insisted that the organisation’s role
was merely that of a study group (rather than a party), and the group was a
priori subordinate (“a provisional detachment purely conjunctural to the
proletariat”) to any autonomous workers’ organisation.[77]
The irresolvable organisational dispute within SoB finally saw Claude
Lefort and Henri Simon leaving the group in 1958 to form Informations et
Liasons Ouvrieres (ILO), which in 1960 became Informations Correspondance
Ouvrieres (ICO).[78]
Within these groupings, liaison, and information were taken as more important
than theorising, and workers’ everyday struggles were raised to the very stuff
of socialism.[79]
For Henri Simon, the spontaneous struggles arising from the capitalist system
moved inexorably towards autonomy and the destruction of hierarchy.[80]
Simon’s successor group to ICO, Echanges et Mouvements, developed these
anti-vanguardist contentions, insisting that all “revolutionary groups” were in
decline, that their existence played no real role anyhow, and that workers were
themselves taking the path of revolution. Echanges thus modestly
restricts its role to the exchange of information and theoretical discussion.[81]

For those inclined towards spontaneism, it
was the logic of the historical process that educated the working class and
generated the movement towards socialism. Socialism was a process, a
dialectic of struggle and consciousness.[82]
For Luxemburg, for instance: “The unconscious comes before the conscious. The
logic of the historic process comes before the subjective logic of human beings
who participate in the historic process”.
[83]
Here, history is frequently viewed as a story of “unceasing progress”,[84]
where, in Mattick’s words, things seem to inexorably “roll uphill”.[85]
At its most extreme, this doctrine – relying on History and its attendent
catastrophes, or, in anarchism, the revolutionary instinct - becomes a recipe
for attentisme (“revolutionary waiting”): “[It is] unnecessary to fight
against the propaganda agencies of the totalitarian rulers with their own
weapons … [These ideologies’] inconsistency with reality will become openly
apparent at the moment the masses are forced to face the material overthrow of
society”.[86]

Perhaps there is some merit in such an
approach. Not only do such claims a priori deny the intellectual and
party any unchallenged authority over the socialist movement, but history, after
all, does indicate the confluence of revolution with war, famine, and natural
disaster, rather than with the intervention of socialist parties.However, this
attentiste stance has meant that, in some ways, councilism
makes no advance on the ultra-determinism and unshakable optimism of the Second
International. For instance, while many of these thinkers – Pannekoek, Gorter,
Lukacs, for instance – turned to questions of consciousness, consciousness can
never achieve any independence. Lukacs is exemplary here : “Only the
consciousness of the proletariat can point the way that leads out of the impasse
of capitalism … But the proletariat is not given any choice …”.[87]
Further, as Murray Bookchin points out, economic decline and catastrophe are
just as likely – perhaps more likely – to elicit reformism and resignation.[88]
Bernstein’s challenge to catastrophism/attentisme and Luxemburg’s
response are highly revealing. Bernstein rejected the law of value and the idea
of collapse, arguing that trusts would allow capitalism to survive almost
indefinitely.[89]
Luxemburg replied: “Bernstein began his revision of the social democracy by
abandoning the theory of capitalist collapse. The latter, however, is the
cornerstone of scientific socialism.”[90]
This response is, though, little but a declaration of stubborn faith. As
Guttsman[91]
and Kitching[92]
argue, inevitability doctrines seem to function as a psychological placebo or a
revolutionary myth for the unsuccessful intellectual.

Thinkers like Pannekoek and Mattick
rejected vanguardism for spontaneism. However, they were unable to put up with
immobilising spontaneism and they continued to intervene, theorise, and
organise. Castoriadis was more critical of the illusions of spontaneism and he
did not allow the fear of Jacobinism to eclipse the political dimension.
Similarly, libertarian socialism’s “educationist” tendency sees a combination of
the stricture that proletarian emancipation must be self-emancipation with the
contention that socialist intellectuals and socialist organisations have a
potentially important role to play in the revolutionary process. Communists like
William Morris, Daniel De Leon, the SLP, and the SPGB prioritised education. For
Morris, “the only rational means of attaining to the New Order of Things” was by
“making socialists by educating them”.[93]
In an article in which he farewelled political activity, Morris maintained: “I
say make Socialists. We socialists can do nothing else that is useful, and
preaching and teaching is not out of date for that purpose”.[94]
Similarly, according to Daniel De Leon, the SLP had an important role as an
“educational-propaganda organisation”. The SLP sought to refine “the character
and moral fibre of the mass” and to alter enslaving habits of thought.[95]
And Cole[96]
and Pankhurst[97]
insisted that the problem ahead was an educational one.

For many Marxian libertarian socialists,
the political bankruptcy of socialist orthodoxy necessitated a theoretical
break. This break took a number of forms. The Bordigists[98]
and the SPGB championed a super-Marxian intransigence in theoretical matters.
Other socialists made a return “behind Marx” to the anti-positivist programme of
German idealism. Libertarian socialism has frequently linked its
anti-authoritarian political aspirations with this theoretical differentiation
from orthodoxy. While contending that there can be no purely theoretical
solution to the problems that socialism addresses, many libertarian socialists
have importantly both attempted to make a break from the determinist and
authoritarian implications of theoretical orthodoxy and they have
continued to view a rational comprehension of society as a whole and of the
possibilities for change as an important goal for socialist intellectuals. Such
a stance has again entailed a difficult but important and inescapable
negotiation. On the one side, libertarian socialists have battled against the
possibilities of theory and theorists dominating the socialist movement. On the
other side, they have continued to intervene as theorists and to act as if
theory mattered.

Those within the broad Marxian tradition
sought a theoretical escape route from the consequences of orthodoxy that would
still be, after all, Marxian. “Western Marxism”, offered a philosophical
correlate to the political challenges made by the “left” wing communism attacked
by Lenin and the Comintern.[99]
Implicitly rejecting the notion that theory reaches its zenith with Marx,
returning “behind Marx” to Hegel and other “bourgeois” philosophers, Western
Marxism accents history, totality, dialectics, and examines questions about
culture and human autonomy. Contrary to the orthodox socialist emphasis on the
purely scientific study of economic structuring, it stresses the critical
aspect of theorising.[100]
In a similar vein, though turning to Joseph Dietzgen rather than Hegel,
Pannekoek accepted the relativistic view of human knowledge that followed the
collapse of faith in naïve positivism.[101]
In this vein, Pannekoek claimed that Marxism, though a science, was not outside
of evolution and regression. Marxism’s importance lay in its partisan nature, as
the ideology of the revolutionary working class movement.[102]

Karl Korsch is a particularly interesting
figure because he remained a libertarian socialist for a large part of his life
and because of the persistent urge towards theoretical openness in his work.
Korsch rejected the eternal and static, and he was obsessed by the essential
role of practice in a theory’s truth. For Korsch, no theory could escape
history, not even Marxism. In this vein, Korsch even credited the stimulus for
Marx’s Capital to the movement of the oppressed classes. Further, for
Korsch,[103]
Marxist theory was not a positive but primarily a critical theory, being
concerned not with detached contemplation but with active transformation. Given
this, Marxian concepts, explained Korsch,[104]
“are not dogmatic fetters” or pre-established truths: they “are an undogmatic
guide for scientific research and revolutionary action. ‘The proof of the
pudding is in the eating’.”

Like many Marxian libertarian socialists,
Korsch’s work is haunted by the tension between an authoritarian autonomisation
of theory as science and the anti-intellectual conclusion that theory is
completely without autonomy. Relatedly, in Korsch, a positivist and scientistic
thrust confronts a Hegelian and dialectical thrust.[105]
Korsch wanted to save Marx from his scientistic Kautskyite and Leninist
interpreters, denying that these interpreters had described the real Marx.
Simultaneously, however, Korsch periodically found Marx too positivist and too
uncritical of bourgeois science.[106]
In the contributions of thinkers who have expounded the goal of autonomy, we
find a way beyond these sorts of blockages in emancipatory political practice.

Autonomy

Because he explicitly both rejected
Leninist vanguardism and criticised spontaneism, Cornelius Castoriadis is
a particularly important figure within the broad field of emancipatory
discourse. For Castoriadis, the emancipation of the mass of people was the task
of those people; however, the socialist thinker could not simply fold his or her
arms. Castoriadis argued that the special place accorded to the intellectual
should belong to each autonomous citizen. However, he rejected attentisme,
maintaining that, in the struggle for a new society, intellectuals needed to
“place themselves at a distance from the everyday and from the real”.[107]

In 1953, Castoriadis established contact
with the aged Pannekoek, sending the latter twelve issues of Socialisme ou
Barbarie, and an interesting exchange took place between the old and the new
representatives of council communism.[108]
Pannekoek applauded SoB’s efforts but criticised Castoriadis’ programme
as attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable - self-government with leadership
by a small vanguard group - and consequently as tending towards Leninism.[109]
Castoriadis responded that socialist organisations need not be Leninist and
that, in reality, a small nucleus of avant-garde workers could spark
larger battles that might eventually draw together large sections of the working
class.[110]

Castoriadis rejected the “messianic
mysticism” of ICO’s spontaneism, arguing that intellectuals and organisation
were still important for ideological struggle and exemplary action, and that
this did not mean substitutionism: “People’s evolution is not ‘autonomous’ in
the absolute; it occurs in the midst of a struggle and of a social dialectic in
which capitalists, Stalinists, and so on are constantly present … It is one
thing to condemn the conception of party as ‘director’, it is another to reject
one’s own responsibilities and say [like ILO/ICO], ‘Our sole point of view
consists in putting our newspaper at the disposal of those who want to speak’.”[111]
A revolutionary organisation is an important instrument, one instrument,
in the struggle for socialism.[112]
Still, the most important factor in socialism is the mass of people: “they alone
can invent, create a solution to a problem of which today no one can have even a
suspicion”.[113]
Further, the seeds of socialism arise most crucially from people’s everyday
“experience of work and of life under capitalism”.[114]
In essence, for Castoriadis: “To be revolutionary signifies both to think that
only the masses in struggle can resolve the problems of socialism and not to
fold one’s arms for all that; it means to think that the essential content of
the revolution will be given by the masses’ creative, original and unforeseeable
activity, and to act oneself, beginning with a rational analysis of the present
and with a perspective that anticipates the future.”[115]

Castoriadis was also eventually able to
explicitly make the break from Marxism, while retaining within his thought the
essentials of critical social theory. For Castoriadis, revolutionary theory was
an essential moment in the struggle for a new social order, as it answered
questions about the significance of everyday struggles by ordinary people and
connected these to the problem of society and of social transformation.[116]
Castoriadis did not, however, thereby disregard the practical and historical
presuppositions of theoretical development. After all, he asserted, “Marx could
not have anticipated the Commune … nor Lenin the soviets”.[117]

Castoriadis rejected the major premises of
Marxian economics, Marxism’s external and teleological laws of history, its
consequent elimination of class struggle, and its tautological claims to
scientificity.[118]
Today, Marxism functions simply as ideology, an eternal and closed doctrine that
veils reality in the so-called communist nation-states.[119]
Though one can - indeed must - discern the difference in any period between
truth and error and arrive at a “provisional totalisation of truth”, the
ideology of a complete and definitive theory safe from history is a bureaucratic
and manipulative fantasy. With the passing of what Castoriadis[120]
called the “theological phase of history”, this fantasy cannot be revived.

This thinking beyond Marxism, which
retains a commitment to rational and critical social theory, embraces, I
believe, all that is worth holding onto within the libertarian socialist
tradition, while jettisoning the unsupportable philosophical axioms or
scientific pretensions of that tradition. Today, the kind of break from Marxism
(which is not, for all that, anti-Marxian) made by Castoriadis is vital for any
progressive transformatory project. Such a theoretical commitment advances on
anti-intellectualist spontaneism and workerism, and it goes beyond the frequent
scientism and closure of the left-Marxian return to Marx. Theory does, here,
remain important for comprehending and changing the world. As Best and Kellner
put it, “social theories provide mappings of contemporary society: its
organisation; its constitutive social relations, practices, discourses, and
institutions; its integrated and interdependent features; its conflictual and
fragmentary features; and its structures of power and modes of oppression and
domination”.[121]

The inclusive democracy project has
attempted to develop elements within the classical democratic and socialist
traditions and currents of the new social movements into a programme for
comprehensive economic, political, cultural, and social change. Most
importantly, the inclusive democracy project seeks to replace the market economy
and statist democracy with an inclusive democracy.[122]
Taking as fundamental the assertion that the mark of autonomy is the conscious
and self-reflective creation and re-creation by people as a collectivity of
their institutions and laws, the inclusive democracy project eschews vanguardism
and views politics as praxis rather than technique.[123]
This means autonomy as both ends and means for the project. The new political
organisation must therefore be a “democracy in action”, which will function at a
variety of levels but will nonetheless need to be part of a comprehensive
programme for social change.[124]
In the end, the hopes of the inclusive democracy project come down to “our own
conscious and self-reflective choice between the two main historical traditions:
the tradition of heteronomy which has been historically dominant, and the
tradition of autonomy”.[125]
The main work ahead, for the inclusive democracy project, is both in creating
local realms of democracy and in education. Of the latter, Fotopoulos has spoken
of the need to “connect today’s economic and ecological crisis to the present
sociao-economic system and the need to replace it with an inclusive democracy
based on confedreated self-reliant communities”.[126]

Theoretically, the inclusive democracy
project has sought to avoid both antiquated objectivism and post-modern
philosophical relativism, which Fotopoulos has charged can lead to both
irrationalism and apoliticism.[127]
Further, the inclusive democracy project has sought to distance itself from both
scientistic and philosophical Marxism. Lastly, Fotopoulos has also attempted to
provide an alternative to the dialectical naturalism promoted by Murray Bookchin.
For Fotopoulos, Bookchin’s assumption of social evolution is both unfounded and
potentially harmful because of its affinity with the heteronomous tradition of
social thought. Instead, the inclusive democracy project has sought to once
again emphasise the autonomous historical tradition and the choice between
heteronomy and autonomy as the only foundation of, and hope for, social change.
This conclusion, rejecting the illusory foundations of doctrine, science, and
History, and relying only on the everpresence of politics and on the necessarily
collective character of progressive social change, is vital for emancipatory
thought – moving us beyond both socialist orthodoxy and post-modernism.

Conclusion

Libertarian socialists have been forced to
tread an uncertain and difficult path. Consistent critics of representation
(viewing it, like Marx, as “something passive”), libertarian socialists have
eschewed directorial pretensions, while nevertheless finding themselves
propelled into political contestation by their own commitments. At numerous
instances, then, libertarian socialists have tended to go beyond the bind of the
fetishism of party and intellectuals versus the fear of party and intellectuals.
The political path for libertarian socialists could, then, be described as an
“advance without authority”.

Such an advance entails a scepticism
towards the vanguardist tendencies of intellectuals and a realisation that, in
Castoriadis’ words, “the great majority of men and women living in society are
the source of creation, the principle bearers of the instituting imaginary, and
… they should become the active subjects of an explicit politics”.[128]
It also entails a realisation that history means that some are more advanced
towards the progressive goal than others and that, as Bookchin notes,
“spontaneity has to be informed”.[129]

The enlightened modesty and libertarianism
demonstrated by some libertarian socialists does not, however, mean that these
thinkers are interesting merely for approximating currently fashionable
post-modernist positions. By avoiding the anti-political, particularistic, and
romantic-individualist tendencies of post-modernism, libertarian socialists have
something more to offer. All traditions cannot be of equal value for the
intellectual committed to extending democracy in all directions. That is, strong
evaluations must be made. These evaluations do not, however, arise from the
efforts of special individuals, as in Rorty’s conception of the post-modern
“ironist” or in Said’s romantic restatement of the heritage of the modern
intellectual, those who “think otherwise”, the “antennae of the race”.[130]
Rather, such evaluations have historical coordinates. These coordinates
necessarily entail a certain situatedness, rather than a Sartrean universality.
In this, the inclusive democracy project rightly asserts that “it is only at the
local level, the community level, that direct and economic democracy can be
founded today”.[131]
Here, the task would be to create “local public realms of direct and economic
democracy which, at some stage, will confederate in order to create the
conditions for the establishment of a new society”.[132]
This stance also necessarily involves the rejection of communitarian
particularism. Without the notion of universalisms, an oppositional stance
becomes problematic, and we are left, as Jennings and Kemp-Welch maintain,
simply with the endless circulation of discourse.[133]
As Castoriadis argued, the intellectual must maintain a critical function while
acknowledging that “history is the domain in which there unfolds the creativity
of all people, both men and women, the learned and the illiterate, a humanity in
which [the intellectual] … is only one atom”.[134]
The overarching value is that of autonomy, which is, of course, a universalism.
This highly immodest goal of universal emancipation – anathema to many
post-modernist thinkers – is combined, in the best of libertarian socialist
thought, with a practical commitment to political organisation and engagement.

Castoriadis’ modest response serves as a fine summary of the best that
emancipatory thought has to offer here: “I think that immense tasks are to be
accomplished on the level of elucidating the problematic of revolution, of
denouncing falsehoods and mystifications, of spreading just and justifiable
ideas, as well as relevant, significant, and precise information”; “As for the
rest, we can do nothing: the workers will struggle or they won’t, the women’s
movement will spread or it won’t … But what one should feel responsible for is
that in France [for example] there are at least hundreds of people who are
thinking by the problematic that matters to us … The only way to find out if you
can swim is to get into the water.”[135]

[1]
This phrase is taken from Zygmunt Bauman’s Life in Fragments: Essays
in Postmodern Morality, (Blackwell, 1995).

[3]
Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an
Age of Apathy, (Basic Books, 2000).

[4]
Jacoby in Jennings, J and Kemp-Welch, A, “The Century of the
Intellectual: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie” in Jennings, J
and Kemp-Welch, A (eds), Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus
Affair to Salman Rushdie, (Routledge, 1997).

[18]
in Schalk, D, L, “Are Intellectuals a Dying Species? War and the Ivory
Tower in the Postmodern Age”, in Jennings, J and Kemp-Walsh, A, Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie,
(Routledge, 1997).

[24]
Despite their post-structuralist leanings and against the post-modernist
“deviation of the intellectuals”, Said and Norris have championed the
heroic-individualist conception of the intellectual who seeks to advance
human freedom and knowledge, who courageously “speaks the truth to
power”, and who remains defiantly undomesticated. (Said, E, W, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures,
(Vintage, 1994).)

[25]
Cornelius Castoriadis, World In Fragments: Writings on Politics,
Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, (Stanford University
Press, 1997), p. 47.

[27]
Alvin Gouldner, Against Fragmentation: The Origins of Marxism and the
Sociology of Intellectuals, (Oxford University Press, 1985), p.49.

[28]
Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New
Class, (Macmillan, 1979), p.9.

[29]
Gouldner The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class,
p. 75.

[30]
This dispute centred on the role of the intellectuals who had entered
the party in large numbers in the 1890s and who were viewed by some as
responsible for a veritable de-proletarianisation, and even of an
accompanying de-radicalisation, of socialism (Carl Pierson, Marxist
Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany, 1887-1912,
(Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 9,79).

[31]
Stanley Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class
Mentality in Germany 1887-1912, (Harvard University Press, 1993),
p.32. “We should have to put off the triumph of socialism not to the
year two thousand but to the end of the world if we had to wait upon the
delicate, shrinking and impressionable hesitancy of the intellectuals”
(Paul Lafargue, in Danial De Leon, Socialism and Anarchism, (New
York Labour News, 1970), p. 323. 19).

[32]
Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements
from the Industrial Revolution to Hitler's Seizure of Power. Vol. I From
the Industrial Revolution to the First World War and its Aftermath,
(Greenwood, 1976), p.486.

[38]
Engels’ serialised attack on Duhring, part of which was reproduced as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, proved the “single most important
source of the spread of Marxian thought in Europe” (Gary Steenson, “Not One Man! Not One Penny!”: German Social Democracy, 1863-1914,
(University of Pittsburgh), p. 193).

[45]
Robert Daniels, Marxism and Communism: Essential Readings,
(Random House, 1965), p.113. In the months leading up to the October
Revolution, Lenin came to terms with the shock of the collapse of the
Second International and was excited into libertarian mode by the unrest
and radicality of the Russian working class. However, even in The
State and Revolution the role of the vanguard (references to the
party, notes Carmen Sirianni, being suspiciously absent) was still
essential. In the period after the 1917 revolution, vanguardist
principles again assumed a central place in Lenin’s thought. (Carmen
Sirianni, Workers’ Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet
Experience, (Verso, 1982)).

[47]
Lagardelle in David Beetham, “Reformism and the ‘Bourgeoisification’ of
the Labour Movement” in Carl Levy (ed.), Socialism and the
Intelligentsia: 1880-1914, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987),
pp.111-2.

[68]
Luxemburg clung to the social democratic vision of the mass party,
refusing until late in the piece to leave the SPD, and then only in
order to collaborate with the USPD (a party built up on a similar model
to the SPD). It was better, argued Luxemburg, to be part of a reformist
party in which the masses participated than in a doctrinally-pure sect
without the masses, a head without a body.

[71]
In sad contrast to his own bitter experience in the Hungarian Communist
Party, Lukacs praised the immense comradeship and depth of selfless
solidarity to be found in such a revolutionary grouping.

[98]
Amadeo Bordiga saw Marxism as a completed system, insisting on “no
revision whatsoever of the primary principle of proletarian revolution”.
Bordiga boasted of never having read a page of idealist philosophy, and
forthrightly promoted vulgar materialism (Donald Sassoon, One hundred
Years of Socialism1996:83; Paul Piccone, Italian Marxism,
(University of California Press, 1983), p. 134; Communist Left, December
Party Meeting (http://www.geocities.com-/CapitolHill/3303,
1951)). Bordiga’s theoretical interventions must be seen as every bit as
much a reaction to “conformist communism” as the turn away from the
doctrinal understanding of Marxism. With his notion of the “invariant”
communist programme, Bordiga sought to differentiate his politics from
those of orthodoxy with a theoretical commitment of astounding rigidity
and consistency, lamenting the compromises, political and theoretical,
of the socialist parties.

[100]
Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, (New Left
Books, 1976). For Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory was dominated by the
concern for reasonable conditions of life: “Thought is not something
independent, to be separated from this struggle [for a new life]” (in
Douglas Kellner and Steven Bronner (eds), Critical Theory and
Society: A Reader, (Routledge, 1989), p. 204).

[115]
Castoriadis Political and Social Writings Vol. I, p. 298. Though
Gramsci drifted to a “ferocious Jacobinism” (Joseph Femia, Marxism
and Democracy, (OUP, 1993)), he provides a useful model in his
struggle with Bordiga’s ultra-leftist Blanqusim, rejecting pure
spontaneity, stressing the force of ideas in historical change, positing
a decisive place for education and the intellectual, and emphasizing the
political aspect of socialist work against Bordiga’s strangely
apolitical political fetishism: that is, in Bordiga the party was
appointed to a leading role that it could not work towards taking up.

[118]
Castoriadis The Castoriadis Reader, pp. 17,25. Neither, argued
Castoriadis, can one save Marxism by separating method and content a
la Lukacs: “How are we to know which category corresponds to which
material?” (The Castoriadis Reader, p. 143).

[129]
Murray Bookchin, Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left;
Interviews and Essays, 1993-1998, (AK Press, 1999), p. 296. Bookchin
argues the case for a non-centralised vanguard organization that is made
of interlinked affinity groups, and organized in a radically democratic
manner.